Archive for November 2013
Smartphone penetration in France reaches 60%; nearly 10M doing M-Commerce in-store.
Smartphone penetration in France has reached 60%, with 28.4 Million smartphones being used in France in September, Comscore reports – that’s 700,000 more smartphones since Q1 of this year. As smartphone adoption rapidly grows in France (4G rolling out; both iPhone & Android penetration growing), it is interesting to look at how French consumers are using smartphones, […]
Where do you buy while mobile? Another £2.5M for the mobile ecommerce platform
Shopcade is the go-to ecommerce platform that serves over 16.000 retailers and 150.000 brands. Using big data to fuel their discovery engine Shopcade is able to predict demand even before Amazon – a remarkable feat in itself. With Fancy-like features like wanting a product and tagging items to express different emotions towards products Shopcade […]
Smart connectivity, video as a service and more take center stage at DigiWorld Summit November 19-21st
One of Europe’s longest running (35 years!) and most impactful conferences is getting ready to kick-off this November 19th in Montpellier. The DigiWorld Summit is organized each year by iDATE, one of the world’s leading think tanks and research organizations focusing on telecoms, media and internet technology. Having focused on the theme ‘Game changers’ – Mobile-Cloud-Big […]
Home, Health & Payments – Orange CEO Stephane Richard’s 5 big announcements
Positioning themselves as the Open Innovation leader Orange has just announced several initiatives to establish new platforms of innovation. Stéphane Richard himself took the stage at the Orange Hello Show to make some very bold announcements on how will Orange take advantage of its global presence and expertise in mobile networks to push new services […]
P2P lending platform Pret d’Union receives €10 Million as LeBonCoin’s 1st French investment
Schibsted, the Swedish media company which owns French classified ad website Le Bon Coin (think “Craigslist for France”), announced today that it has invested €10 Million in peer-to-peer lending platform Pret d’Union in order accelerated their growth. The startup, which offers credit services similar to The Lending Club, provided €5 Million in loans in September 2013 […]
Payleven’s Square-like payments terminal arrives in France, available in Apple stores for 49€
Update: we have received an update about this article from Payleven, stating that, despite announcing in their press release that Payleven is launching in France, the product in fact will not be available in the Apple Store until at least next April. In addition, the product will not be sold on the Apple store for […]
The Maturing of HTML5: 5 Lessons from HTML5 Developers’ Conference
During his conference Keynote, Intel’s VP Christos Georgiopoulos brought up the Gartner Growth Cycle and ventured that we had finally entered the era of productivity for HTML5. If the activities, professionalism, and presentations delivered during the HTML5 Developers’ Conference are any indicator, Christos is spot on in his assessment. This spring the conference was held […]
SNCF will do anything to stay competitive… except add WiFi in their trains.
France’s main train travel provider SNCF has been making quite a number of sweeping changes in their service in preparation for European Commission-encouraged competition entering the market in the coming years. In addition to adding a low-cost offer in an attempt to stave off price-cutting competition, the company has also increased the service aspect of […]
Rentabiliweb back to growth with a big jump in Q3 revenues
Digital monetization leader Rentabiliweb is back in growth mode having achieved 14.2% revenue growth last quarter, bringing their total revenues for the quarter to a higher than expected €18.2 million. This strong performance brings their total revenues for the first 9 months of the year to a healthy €51.8 million. Their strong performance was largely […]
RudeVC: Maybe Local matters after all
Two years ago I wrote a short blurb entitled, “Does Local Matter?” in which I provocatively questioned the future relevance of the Local network component in the overhyped buzzwords of Social / Local / Mobile. We even jumped on the bandwagon by launching a tax-optimizing holding vehicle called SoLoMoCo to focus on this fad. So […]